ter, a frequently recommended sales tactic. For example, a manufacturer may sell equipment to a utility, and the sold equipment can collect data on pricing and usage. Sud- denly the ability to analyze all that big data on consumers could become an added value in selling to the utility. Of course, some utilities analyze their customer data, but not all, especially smaller ones. OEMs are often much bigger and have more sophisticated analytics shops than their customers. Major consumer-goods producers often help their retail outlets forecast sales for planning purposes. One


The Future of Big Data


Big Data is new, and we are just beginning to understand its poten- tial for sales. ZS Associates’s Alex Contreras believes sales organiza- tions will use big-data tools in two ways: 1) to do what they are already doing to help reps sell but better, faster, and cheaper; and 2) to stra- tegically change the ways they sell based on the full power of big-data technology. So far, 6sense has generally worked with such high-growth tech- nology companies as Cisco and Xactly, but Alison Murdock, 6sense’s vice president of marketing, notes that manufacturing companies also generate massive amounts of data for analysis, as do B2B health firms, telecoms, and hospitality compa- nies. She says 6sense techniques work best with long-considered B2B purchasing cycles, not impulsive pur- chases, and firms with large buying committees are ideal candidates for 6sense analysis. Murdock sees big data getting ever bigger and analytics moving from predictive to prescriptive appli- cations. For example, new applica- tions may automatically preapprove discounts for selected prospects. She further predicts that data itself will move to center stage, and marketing automation and customer relationship management systems


Teradata client helps its retailers this way by collecting transaction data from all customer touch points – brick- and-mortar, fixed-digital, and mobile-digital business – and aggregating it for them. To support these types of big-data analytics, Tera- data partners with such software firms as SAS, business intelligence tools such as Cognos and Microstrategy, and visualization tools such as Tableau. Usually, the partners work directly with client IT and marketing de- partments, but the aim is to flexibly support sales and other users. 


will “hang off” big data. With emails and cookies, 6sense will know who all the prospects are and how to sell to them. Qlik’s Mike Saliter, vice president of industry solutions, says data has been merged traditionally in cen- tralized data warehouses provided by Teradata, Oracle, and IBM, but this approach is losing momentum. Increasingly, semistructured data is going into temporary storage places, dubbed “data lakes,” such as those provided by Hadoop. “Then Qlik and other analytics can make sense of it,” Saliter explains. Saliter predicts that, in the future, big data will grow only more impor- tant and more firms will exploit it, and the Internet of Things will also grow in significance. Peter Ostrow, Aberdeen Group’s


research group director in sales ef- fectiveness, predicts that the analysis of big data may help sales reps be- come their own “micromarketers.” Instead of sending generic messages to prospects, reps can use analytics


to personalize message content and medium. “We are moving away from the old world of generating a hundred standard reports and [waiting] six months to get a different report, to a new world that enables users to use business-intelligence tools and data up to their skill levels,” explains Bill Franks, chief analytics officer at Tera- data. College graduates know how to query data, and the explosion in data means it no longer makes sense to restrict access to it. Most people can profitably use data in basic Tab- leau format, and highly skilled users can tap the deeper analytics tools available.


Franks sees a trend toward partnerships between users and IT staff. IT teams can build the basic application to answer a certain kind of question, then marketers or salespeople can ask for variations of the app to answer specific ques- tions. IT staff and users can work together regularly to streamline the process. 


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